You encounter so many people every day, online and off-, that it is almost impossible to be alone. Now, thanks to computers, those people might not even be real.
China is in the grip of a momentous crisis. The novel coronavirus that emerged late last year has already claimed three times more lives than the SARS outbreak in 2003, and it is still spreading.
It can happen at any moment, yet we’re never prepared. When Twitter crashes, how do we tweet about it? We try and try. When Instagram is down, no one can see what we see.
In an era when millions of songwriters upload music to the internet—and just about any song can be plucked from obscurity by TikTok teens—it seems inevitable that the same melodies end up in different songs.
Okay, but what is Dispatch? Put simply, Dispatch is: All of the ad-hoc things you’re doing to manage incidents today, done for you, and a bunch of other things you should’ve been doing, but have not had the time!
On Tuesday, a spacecraft that was launched four months earlier docked with a communications satellite about 36,000km above the Earth. Northrop Grumman reported the historic docking on Wednesday, and the company heralded the mission as an "historic accomplishment" in the field of satellite servicing.
NASA is close to finalizing a plan to land humans on the Moon in 2024 and is expected to publicly discuss it next month.
Two satellites docked together high above Earth on Tuesday, successfully extending the life of one that was running out of fuel.
Disclosure: “This article is personal opinion of research based on my experience of almost 20 years. There is no third party advertising on this page or monetised links of any kind. Any external links to third party sites are moderated by me. Disclaimer.” Shaun Anderson, Hobo
Amber Case has been deeply integrated in technology since her first coding job at 14 years old. Today, she is known for many things: cyborg anthropologist, writer, speaker, product developer and author.
Updated on March 22 at 9:06 p.m. ET. Two years ago, Desmond Hughes heard so many of his favorite podcasters extolling AirPods, Apple’s tiny, futuristic $170 wireless headphones, that he decided they were worth the splurge. He quickly became a convert.
Create a social network or risk everything. That was the original pitch for Google's Facebook rival, Google+, a refrain hammered over and over by the social network's chief architect, Vic Gundotra, in meetings with the company's top brass.
A group of us in Google’s People Operations (what we call HR) set out to answer this question using data and rigorous analysis: What makes a Google team effective? We shared our research earlier today with the Associated Press, and we’re sharing the findings here, as well.
There was a time when the world’s two great superpowers were obsessed with nuclear weapons technology. Today the flashpoint is between the US and China, and it involves the wireless technology that promises to connect your toaster to the web.
Every time you open Facebook, one of the world’s most influential, controversial, and misunderstood algorithms springs into action.
The work could lead to a new approach to the study of what is possible, and how it follows from what already exists.
When the kids in Skyler’s school want to tell a friend something in class, they don’t scrawl a note down on a tiny piece of paper and toss it across the room. They use Google Docs.
One Man’s Quest to Rid Wikipedia of Exactly One Grammatical MistakeNo misuse of “comprise” will sneak past this WikiGnome.On a Friday in July 2012, two employees of the Wikimedia Foundation gave a talk at Wikimania, their organization’s annual conference.
It’s mid-afternoon on a Friday at SpaceX headquarters in Hawthorne, California, and three of Elon Musk’s children are gathered around him – one of his triplets, both of his twins.
Biographer Ashlee Vance examines the troubles at Tesla, SpaceX, and SolarCity. Elon Musk recently took the stage in Guadalajara, Mexico, for the performance he’s waited a lifetime to give.
I read technology articles quite often and see plenty of authors attempt to dissect or describe the teenage audience, especially in regards to social media. However, I have yet to see a teenager contribute their voice to this discussion. This is where I would like to provide my own humble opinion.
One of the big questions surrounding the first launch of SpaceX's Crew Dragon spacecraft was how the Russians would react.
Dating websites have changed the way couples meet. Research indicates that this change is influencing levels of interracial marriage and even the stability of marriage itself.
This is Part 3 of a four-part series on Elon Musk’s companies. For an explanation of why this series is happening and how Musk is involved, start with Part 1. Pre-Post Note: I started working on this post ten weeks ago. When I started, I never intended for it to become such an ordeal.
In March 2009, Uber was born. Over the next few years, the company became not just a disruptive, controversial transportation company, but a model for dozens of venture-funded companies.
I've broken this story up into three chapters. It should never have gone this far, but the internet works in mysterious ways. None of this should have ever happened. It makes absolutely no sense at all. It's truly crazy.
You’ve probably seen this effect—perhaps you are a victim of it. You feel alienated from mainstream culture and want to make a statement that you are not part of it.
This is Part 1 of a four-part series on Elon Musk’s companies. Last month, I got a surprising phone call.
In 1900, 30 million people in the United States were farmers. By 1990 that number had fallen to under 3 million even as the population more than tripled. So, in a matter of speaking, 90% of American agriculture workers lost their jobs, mostly due to automation.
Let me describe what I hear as I sit in a coffee shop writing this article. It’s late morning on a Saturday, between the breakfast and lunch rushes. People talk in hushed voices at tables. The staff make pithy jokes amongst themselves, enjoying the downtime.
To see additional images from NASA Ames, click the icon on the image at the top of this page. NASA Ames is filled with the exotic technologies of a future that didn’t quite come to pass. Ancient computers still operate equipment in the machine shop.
Last year, a strange self-driving car was released onto the quiet roads of Monmouth County, New Jersey.
Veronica Belmont, a product manager at Adobe Spark, was riding the train down to Silicon Valley, doing some work on her phone, when dozens of teenagers plopped down into the seats around her. Within moments, her phone began blowing up.
Fears about how robots might transform our lives have been a staple of science fiction for decades.
When Max Vest shook hands with the host of his Miami Airbnb back in January, the man introduced himself as Ralph—even though “Ray” was the name he’d used in all their prior communication. This was the first and only indication that something was wrong.
On Monday, October 21, 2013, I sent this letter to our entire team at Airbnb. I have decided to publish this in the event it is helpful to entrepreneurs building their cultures. Our next team meeting is dedicated to Core Values, which are essential to building our culture.
As Instagram has grown to more than 1 billion monthly users, it has ushered in a very particular look: bright walls, artfully arranged lattes and avocado toast, and Millennial-pink everything, all with that carefully staged, color-corrected, glossy-looking aesthetic.
“This is a work of criticism. If it were literary criticism, everyone would immediately understand the underlying purpose is positive.
The following story — on the treatment of female editors, writers, and managers at Gawker Media — was scheduled to appear on Gawker.com on Friday, November 13. It had been originally written in July, kiboshed in August, reported further in October, and prepped to run in early November.
As the decade has gone on, the occurrence of Elon Musk events has increased, and a brief glance back at the timeline shows this isn’t just a psychological phenomenon: Elon really is Elonning more often. Cast your memory back, if you will, to the reaches of Very Recent History.
Web Summit is Europe’s largest tech conference, and a terrifying place in which to get lost. In this vast grazing-ground for investors and entrepreneurs, thousands stampede in what looks like panic through the three vast halls of Lisbon’s FIL exhibition center.
In a short, viral video shared widely since Friday, Catholic high-school students visiting Washington, D.C., from Kentucky for the March for Life appeared to confront, and mock, American Indians who had participated in the Indigenous Peoples March, taking place the same day.
Aaron Shapiro is CEO of Huge, a global digital agency based in Brooklyn, and author of Users Not Customers. He has spent more than a decade as a technology entrepreneur, venture capitalist and management consultant. Jobs in tech are stronger than ever.
I was at a research lab to talk about commercialization. The presenter put up a slide of some exciting new technologies. The slide’s tagline said these technologies would “disrupt the biomedical industry.
I’ve been reading and thinking about the future a lot recently, and decided to spend a week “nerding out” at Singularity University, to satisfy my curiosity. It was a great event, featuring experts from across the entire spectrum of technology and innovation.
In the history of marketing, there’s a classic tale that centers on the humble cake mix. During the nineteen-fifties, there were differences of opinion over how “instant” powdered cake mixes should be, and, in particular, over whether adding an egg ought to be part of the process.
Even the cheesiest, most cloyingly overearnest romance movies lack the pathos of the pop-up notifications you get when you cancel an online subscription.
There’s no picture of the moment when everything changed for Kevin Systrom. But if there were, it would look something like this: A lanky, very tall, dark-haired man in his late 20s sits on a bench at the Caltrain commuter station in Palo Alto, California.
Wi-Fi fills our world with radio waves. In your home, in the office, and increasingly on city streets, humans are bathed in a constant background field of 2.4- and 5-gigahertz radio signals. And when people move, they distort this field, reflecting and refracting the waves as they go.
This is the 28th in an exclusive series of 50 articles, one published each day until July 20, exploring the 50th anniversary of the first-ever Moon landing. You can check out 50 Days to the Moon here every day. The Apollo lunar module was a special spaceship in many ways.
Updated on April 19 at 1:28 p.m. ET. There has never been a town like the one San Francisco is becoming, a place where a single industry composed almost entirely of rich people thoroughly dominates the local economy.
There’s a terrible power to the iconic pictures of the space shuttle Challenger exploding — the orange-white fireball in the Florida sky, with the twin contrails of the solid rocket boosters briefly continuing on their journey to nowhere. It’s been 30 years since that awful morning on Jan.
Fourteen years, two months, and eight days ago, I made a mistake. Like a lot of mistakes made at the age of 20 inside a college dorm room, it involved trusting a man I shouldn’t have, and it still affects me to this day. No, Mark Zuckerberg didn’t give me herpes.
One week ago, a group of European security researchers warned that two obscure encryption schemes for email were deeply broken. Those schemes, called OpenPGP and S/MIME, are not the kinds of technologies you’re using but don’t know it.
Yesterday, Elon Musk got on stage at the 2016 International Astronautical Congress and unveiled the first real details about the big fucking rocket they’re making.
A couple of years ago somebody sent me a link to a tweet. It said: “Moderating comments at the Guardian must be the worst job in the world.
They bunked in a double-wide trailer, cramming inside on cots and sleeping bags, as many as a dozen at a time. In the mornings, they feasted on steaming plates of scrambled eggs.
Any fool on the street can tell you that technology is changing at a whiplash-inducing pace. What's much more difficult to predict is which technologies specifically are about to hit big.
Updated at 2:50 p.m. ET on January 30, 2019. The day after Christmas, I spent seven hours sifting through more than 2,700 unread emails I had accumulated over the previous month. Like many other people, I intended to begin 2019 with a fresh inbox and zero unread messages.
Did technology disrupt the drug game, too?
History, as a discipline, comes out of the archive. The archive is not the library, but something else entirely. Libraries spread knowledge that’s been compressed into books and other media.
Nurses are in high demand: The U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics reports that the number of jobs for nurses will grow 15% from 2016 to 2026, which is much faster than other jobs.
A guide to the reality-melting technology in your phone’s camera.
Over the last seven years, software startup investing has changed quite a bit. In 2010, classic SaaS was booming, the benefits of a subscription model were finally becoming clear to the public markets and the mass-market.
Your company exists, in part, because mobile devices enable us to demand consumer-quality experiences in our work software. Five years from now-ish, how close will we be to parity between work and consumer software? Will we even recognize a distinction ultimately between these two things?
Remember Douglas Adams’s 1979 novel “The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy”? It began with some technology snark, dismissing Earth as a planet whose life-forms “are so amazingly primitive that they still think digital watches are a pretty neat idea.
Back in the 1950s, health professionals became concerned that smoking was causing cancer. Then, in 1952, the popular magazine Reader’s Digest published “Cancer by the Carton,” an article about the increasing body of evidence that proved it.
What does a day look like five to 10 years from now? The real answer is I don’t know, and much more importantly, I don’t think anyone knows. Trying to prognosticate is a very dangerous business.
Diffusion network for the article titled “Spirit cooking: Clinton campaign chairman practices bizarre occult ritual," published by the conspiracy site Infowars.com four days before the 2016 U.S. election.
Coding Like a Girl(this was originally given as a talk at AlterConf in Oakland. this talk only addresses gender diversity and was given in the context of other talks addressing racism, disability, classism, and many other topics.
Those old enough to remember video-rental stores will recall the crippling indecision that would overtake you while browsing their shelves. With so many options, any one seemed unappealing, or insufficient. In a group, different tastes or momentary preferences felt impossible to balance.
NO1 Noah understands the career-altering power of social media: The 22-year-old singer, songwriter, lyricist, and producer was initially discovered when people began sharing and re-sharing his work on Twitter and Instagram. But as he hurtles toward mainstream success, he still has to pay the bills.
There is something special happening in a generic office park in an uninspiring suburb near Fort Lauderdale, Florida.
If you’ve ever been tempted by a flutter, you’ll know how bookmakers and casinos stack the odds against you. The clearest example is roulette, where there are 36 red and black numbers plus the green numbers 0 and (in the U.S.) 00. So that’s 38 possibilities in total.
Tony Fadell’s wife likes to remind him when their three children’s eyes are glued to their screens that it’s at least partly his fault. Hard to argue.
This story appears in the August 17, 2015 issue of Forbes. Subscribe In less than two years Slack Technologies has become one of the most glistening of tech's ten-digit "unicorn" startups, boasting 1.1 million users and a private market valuation of $2.8 billion.
When Mandy gets invited to a party, it’s not via Facebook invite, or email, or even text message. She’s 13, so, naturally, it’s through Instagram.
Late one chilly evening last September, I excused myself from a small group huddled around a campfire to peck at and mumble into my phone. No way was a camping trip going to make me miss my Italian lesson.
I bought and read The Manager’s Path by the awesome Camille Fournier when it first came out. At the time, I was a senior Database Engineer aspiring to become a principal engineer in my organization.
But what the heck are they? Well, you’re in for a treat because I’ve put together a complete list.
Updated on June 5 at 12:39 p.m. In October 2016, then-President Barack Obama hosted a miniature version of the blowout tech conference South by Southwest, which the White House called South by South Lawn. Obama, as The New York Times put it at the time, had “brought Silicon Valley to Washington.
More than a thousand days after the water problems in Flint, Michigan, became national news, thousands of homes in the city still have lead pipes, from which the toxic metal can leach into the water supply. To remedy the problem, the lead pipes need to be replaced with safer, copper ones.
Who is the man behind some of the most innovative companies in the world, including Tesla, SpaceX, Planet, D-Wave, and Synthetic Genomics? His name is Steve Jurvetson, and if you’re a tech enthusiast, then you’re intimately familiar with his daring venture capital work.
Peter Thiel has been behind some prominent technologies: he cofounded PayPal and was an early investor in such companies as Facebook and LinkedIn. But he’s convinced that technological progress has been stagnant for decades.
At around three in the afternoon on March 3, 2009, in the fifth week of the trial of Mazoltuv Borukhova—a thirty-five-year-old physician accused of murdering her husband—the judge turned to Borukhova’s attorney, Stephen Scaring, and asked a pro-forma question. “Do you have anything else, Mr.
In my life, I have given a fuck about many people and many things. I have also not given a fuck about many people and many things. And those fucks I have not given have made all the difference. People often say the key to confidence and success in life is to simply “not give a fuck.
Back in 1995, Kurt Vonnegut gave a lecture in which he described his theory about the shapes of stories. In the process, he plotted several examples on a blackboard. “There is no reason why the simple shapes of stories can’t be fed into computers,” he said. “They are beautiful shapes.
In December of 2012, three young men were living in a claustrophobic apartment in San Francisco’s Tenderloin district, working on a technology startup.
BOCA CHICA BEACH, Texas—Elon Musk spoke about his vision of a brighter future for humanity on Saturday evening in South Texas. Musk acknowledged that there are a lot of problems here on Earth, and it is important for those to get fixed.
Tapping through Palak Joshi’s Instagram Stories recently, you might have come across a photo that looked like standard sponsored content: a shiny white box emblazoned with the red logo for the Chinese phone manufacturer OnePlus and the number six, shot from above on a concrete background.
Jack Dorsey, the tech entrepreneur, takes the No. 1 bus to work, and he likes to catch the 7:06. It carries him nearly from one side of San Francisco to the other—down California Street almost to Market.
One of the biggest problems in business development, partnerships, and sales is managing your pipeline. A close second is managing, tracking, and keep up to date with your email inbox. I’ve tried many tools to help both issues but each has had its shortcomings.
Down by the hard-packed beaches at the edge of the country, the rumble of rocket launches has defined Florida's Space Coast for more than half a century. But the end of 2017 could mark the beginning of a new era in solar system exploration.
Welcome to the abyss of the “reverse supply chain,” where hope springs eternal.
Jesse Aguirre’s workday at Slack starts with a standard engineering meeting—programmers call them “standups”—where he and his co-workers plan the day’s agenda. Around the circle stand graduates from Silicon Valley’s top companies and the nation’s top universities.
Earlier this month we marked four years since Instagram launched. Throughout the day, I glanced at what time it was, and thought back to what we were doing four years ago:
The man sitting beside me is sharing the most insightful business advice I’ve heard lately. His ideas are as unconventional as the location of our conversation. We’re not in a coffee shop or a corner office. We’re in an Uber and he’s my driver.
Following the current fashion for visionary technological geniuses to be portrayed through three critical moments in their lives,*_ here are three from Elon Musk's.
The problem began mysteriously. I switched on my Samsung Smart TV to watch the Warriors game, and after about 20 seconds, the CBS News app switched itself on for a few seconds in a small rectangle in the upper left corner.
They would understand my plight in Old Europe. In ancient, barbaric days when local vassals managed petite armies, brute knights often swept into villages, declaring the inhabitants subject to new laws and new lords before riding off again with the changing of the season.
Since Steve Jobs’s death, in 2011, Elon Musk has emerged as the leading celebrity of Silicon Valley. Musk is the CEO of Tesla Motors, which produces electric cars; the CEO of SpaceX, which makes rockets; and the chairman of SolarCity, which provides solar power systems.
LOS ANGELES—As a new immigrant to the United States, Li Zhong Huang knew there was only one place he wanted to live: the Chinatown neighborhood of Los Angeles, where he could be surrounded by language, food, and people from his home province of Guangdong.
Some people can speak a seemingly impossible number of tongues. How do they manage it and what can we learn from them?
How should we tell the story of the digital century, now two decades old? We could focus, as journalists tend to do, on the depredations of the connected life.